What Do You Know about Your Importer for export marketing success?

If you’re in the exporting business, one of the reasons why export marketing is so important is that it can be used to find out crucial information about the importers and buyers in your target country. You can’t just go in blind. You’re just wasting your time and effort if you just approach all the suppliers with a standard approach that you use in your own country.

So here are some ways you can use export marketing strategies to help you gather this crucial data:

You can find out who these buyers are.
It’s a new market, and you’re the new kid on the block. Here, you can use trade shows as a way to introduce your business and to find out the buyers and importers in your industry in the country you’re targeting. With the right trade show tactics, you can get a bunch of calling cards, names and contact info which you can later use to follow up on leads.

You can discover their priorities.
With the right market research, you can discover how these importers choose suppliers like you. Is price their highest priority, or do they care more for the quality of the products? How speedy do they need you to be in delivering the goods? What kind of volume are they expecting from you? By knowing what your importers want from your products, you can then choose the right products to offer and also tweak your pitch accordingly.

The point here is to highlight your differences with your competition and show why you’re the better choice.

You can discover the right kind of approach to make.
Some importers don’t like to be approached; they’ll just call you if they need you. For these people, you need to make sure that they actually know about you and that they know how to contact you. Then there are buyers who like communicating with emails, through social networking websites, or even through the phone. Others may prefer to meet with you face to-face.

You have to accept that people in other do business in other ways than what you’re used to. You don’t have to change everything about you do, but you can change some things and also pick the right buyers who can work with your setup.

You will also have to know how to negotiate successfully. Customs again will be a determining factor, as buyers in Italy are markedly different than buyers in Japan.

It’s said that knowledge is half the battle, and in the export business that’s truer than you realize. With the effective use of export marketing techniques, you can find out all you need to know to export successfully.